“The US system” may allow it, but it’s also real bad at dealing with any name structures other than “one-word firstname, one-word middlename, one-word lastname.”
A whole thread and no one’s mentioned the “Orangejello/Lemonjello” urban legend?
Jim Bob and Billy Bob would disagree, if they could read. And at least two companies, one a government related agency seems to have gotten by fine, even if their parents chose the creative spellings FNMA and SLM. 
I was born with a double barrel name and got by fine. I later changed it but only because I didn’t like it.
Yeah, but it’s spelled La-A.
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Though I guess you’re referring to among other things, Raul Garcia Fernandez being called Mr. Fernandez when the correct courtesy should be Mr. Garcia? So he was to choose between being wrongly referenced, dropping his mother’s name, or combining them into one legal name? Right, no good solution to that, although its common in a lot of countries.
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How about last names that sound like first names? I grew up with a last name that sounded like a girl’s first name, and it did confuse people. I guess if I had been a boy it would have been a little more obvious, which of the three names was the last name.
But I knew people whose last names were Evelyn, Valerie, Barbara (they pronounced it bar-BEAR-uh), Lucy, Lily, and Alison, plus more that I noted but have forgotten. I don’t know why but that seems worse than having a last name that could be a male first name, like Henry or Scott.
As someone who grew up sharing my first name with lots and lots of other kids (for most of my childhood, I had at least 2 friends with the same name, covering a total of 6 kids sharing that name), I have no problem at all with diversifying the pool of names. What does bother me is people who pick a “It sounds the same but is spelled oddly” sort of name. They are dooming their child to a lifetime of spelling out their name to everyone that needs to write it down.
There is an actress who used to be known as James King, but I guess she decided it was too confusing for people to realize she was a woman, and now is billed as Jamie King.
There’s more than just that. What if you have one of these kinds of names —
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family name, first given name, second given name
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family name, second given name, first given name
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family name, hyphenated double given name
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single letter, single letter, given name (no family name)
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given name (no family name)
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given name, patronymic (no family name) — granted, this will fit U.S forms, but will defy the foe rations if you try to apply it throughout your family.
This isn’t always true; for example many German names evolved over time from the words for desirable personal qualities or the attributes associated with them. “Adalbert” “noble+renowned” evolved into “Albrecht” and several similar variants. A parallel development in early English brought about “Albert”; although English has lost nearly all of its Anglo Saxon given names. Such evolution of names is obviously similar to that of ordinary words.
It often happens that a name will “immigrate” from one culture into the next repeatedly. “Nestor” is a reasonably common name in Spanish speaking countries today, because Homer cast a “Nestor” into the Iliad, which was adopted as a founding myth by the Romans, after which the name was passed down to the various Romance-language speaking cultures of southern Europe. So from a contemporary viewpoint the name Nestor has just “always been there”.
Myrtle. My grandmother’s name - classic AND uncommon. Still, nobody wants it :D. Some names will just never be popular.
I bet you that there was someone rolling his or eyes at the “creative” variation the first time someone was called Albrecht instead of Adalbert.
And someone was rolling his or her eyes at a parent naming a child after a character from entertainment.
Why, right here on these boards someone was aghast in one of these “crazy parents and their silly baby names” threads someone was aghast at encountering a child names “Anastasia,” because that’s a character from a Disney Cartoon!, don’t you know, even though it has been a normal name for centuries.
Sounds like when my one friend mentioned a guy she liked, named Hector, and my other friend said “HECTOR?!? Like in the Trojan Wars?!” She apparently wasn’t aware of Hector being a common name among Latino people. Similarly, Mercedes.
There’s also Portia. 
Wow. I never knew that Mercedes was a real, established female person’s given name, or any person’s given name. First time I ever saw or heard of it.
Was this also some god or heroic character from some ancient mythology?
It’s one of those Hispanic names that’s a shortened form of a title for Mary. Maria de los Mercedes, Mary of the Mercies. Like Maria del Pilar, Mary of the Pillar, Maria del Consuelo, Mary of the Good Counsel.